Against expert supremacy

How two men in lab coats convinced a generation to ignore its instincts

For most of human history, babies slept near their mothers. Not because of a theory. Not because of a study. Because in social mammals, the cries of a helpless infant reliably trigger caregiving responses in nearby adults. It’s a natural, deeply evolved behavior across much of the animal kingdom, particularly among mammals and birds (though not most insects).

Across cultures and centuries, from hunter-gatherers to agrarian villages to extended families in close quarters, infants were attended to when they cried. Sometimes immediately, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes exhaustedly. But the baseline assumption was simple: a crying baby is a clear signal to soothe.

Then, very suddenly in historical terms, “we” decided this was wrong.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as industrialization reorganized life around schedules, efficiency, and predictability, a new class of experts emerged to help families “modernize.” Among them was Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, whose book The Care and Feeding of Children became one of the most influential parenting manuals of its era. Holt advocated strict feeding and sleeping schedules. His advice to parents confronting a crying infant was blunt: “let them cry it out.”

Not because babies were manipulative. Not because parents were cruel. But because order had become the highest moral good, without questioning when it made sense to apply. Order for adults might be great. But babies are different.

Around the same time, John B. Watson, founder of behaviorism, extended this logic into psychology. Children, Watson argued, were not developing souls to be nurtured but systems to be conditioned. Too much affection risked dependency. Too much responsiveness risked weakness. His guidance to parents was famously austere: avoid hugging or kissing your child, a handshake would suffice.

It’s easy to caricature these men as villains, but that misses the point. They were not monsters. They were products of factories, of assembly lines, of a culture newly obsessed with control. Their ideas didn’t spread because they were obviously true. They spread because they fit the moment.

Some ideas are Lindy because they’re durably good. Others continue merely because someone made them up and they were adopted. For thousands of years, responsive caregiving survived because it worked. Babies who were soothed survived. Families who stayed attuned endured. No peer-reviewed journals required. The environment itself was the filter.

But the industrial age introduced a strange new force: theories that could temporarily outcompete reality. Ideas that sounded scientific, clean or optimized. Ideas that made life easier for systems, even if they made it worse for humans. “Let babies cry” was one of many of those ideas.

It solved real problems. Parents were exhausted. Nuclear families were isolated. Work schedules were unforgiving. The advice promised rest, structure, and authority: three things modern life was suddenly short on. And so it stuck, not because it had stood the test of time, but because it aligned with the incentives of the moment. This is the danger zone for expertise.

Unlike some other people, I don’t think these experts were intentionally evil. But expertise is contextual. It is downstream of tools, economics, and cultural pressures. When those pressures change, yesterday’s “best practices” can, without fanfare, become today’s bad habits.

What’s striking, in hindsight, is how confidently these ideas contradicted common sense. You didn’t need longitudinal data to feel that withholding affection felt wrong, against nature even. And yet, many parents deferred anyway. Because who were they to argue with “the science™.” This is how bad ideas persist: not forever, but long enough to matter.

Watson’s own family life later became a tragic footnote. Several of his own children struggled deeply and one even died by suicide. The irony is hard to ignore: the man who warned against affection left behind a legacy that raises uncomfortable questions about what happens when theory outruns humanity.

These ideas didn’t die fully, they were simply rebranded. Today, we use softer terms like “graduated extinction” and “sleep training methods.” The language is gentler, but the premise is the same: instinct is treated as something to be overridden in favor of optimization, across parenting, work, education, and health. It’s interesting how long these things can persist in our culture.

This post is not an argument against experts. But is an argument against expert supremacy.

Common sense is not anti-intellectual. It’s accumulated wisdom that survived without needing to explain itself. When an expert claim directly contradicts a behavior that has endured for millennia, that’s not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to pause, and most importantly, think for yourself.

Some ideas deserve their Lindy status. Others are temporary ideas that only seem permanent or official. The trick is learning to tell the difference, being able to think from first principles, and reject that which is clearly misguided.

We should hear what experts have to say about new discoveries, particularly when they have novel insights that might improve our lives, but still never outsource our judgment to them. Especially when their advice requires us to suppress something primal, relational, or deeply human. And most especially when it asks us to ignore signals we evolved to see or hear.

Progress isn’t about rejecting the past wholesale. It’s about keeping what worked, testing what’s new, and having the humility to discard what turned out to be a dead end, even if it once wore a lab coat. Doctors used to recommend certain brands of cigarettes. Hospitals do not practice bloodletting anymore. It was once recommended we eat sugar-filled cereals for breakfast. We get things wrong all the time (I still think the modern atheist movement is wrong, we are misguided putting deodorized industrial lubricants in so many foods, we should be cautious how domesticated we become as other examples). A really interesting thing is you will face pushback here, because everyone is so conditioned to worship expert supremacy. This is why we need a society with healthy open discourse, so we can debate things in earnest.

Of course, not every old idea is good and not every new one is bad. But when common sense and expertise diverge sharply, history suggests a simple rule of thumb: pay very close attention to which one has survived the longest.